PMC Commentary

“Bipartisan foreign policy is the ideal for the executive because you can’t run this damned country any other way.... Now the way to do that is to say politics stops at the seaboard, and anyone who denies that postulate is a son-of-a-bitch and a crook and not a true patriot. Now if people will swallow that then you’re off to the races.”

Thus spoke Dean Acheson, Harry Truman’s secretary of state, in his classic formulation of extreme partisanship as a bludgeon against partisanship. His calculus was raw, domestic Realpolitik in the pursuit of presidential freedom -- a game of necessity, in Acheson’s opinion, but a game he also clearly held disdain for. Compared to the intricacies of international diplomacy, one can hear him thinking, this domestic-Realpolitik business was little more than a game for simpleminded bullies.

Hence it’s the perfect game for the Bushies. Absent any intricacy of thought whatsoever in foreign policy designs, they can bludgeon away with simpleminded partisanship as a wholesale substitute. It’s not quite what Acheson had in mind -- his formula involved some actual policies here and there -- but it’s just what the Doctor (Strangelove) ordered for an administration borne of demagoguery and nurtured by an all too indulgent base.

You may have thought that upcoming national elections would be an ideal opportunity for a practical debate, for instance, on what in the hell we’re doing in Iraq. But you would be wrong. It is, rather, an ideal opportunity for the Bush administration to utterly distract from all things Iraqi and concentrate instead on the issue of competence. Not the administration’s competence, mind you, but the out-of-power party’s competence, which the Bushies are twisting in their uniquely cute way as a kind of unpatriotic incompetence.

As Jim VandeHei of the WP reported, the first part of the president’s “two-front strategy for protecting the Republican congressional majority in an ominous political climate” is to “hammer Democrats on national security” (the other front -- surprise -- lies in labeling Dems as big taxers, and by implication -- try not to gag -- big spenders).

Friday “at a luncheon fundraiser [in Indianapolis], Bush repeatedly called [Republican Rep. Michael] Sodrel an indispensable ally in fighting terrorism, and emphasized his support for the military and a robust U.S. foreign policy. Sodrel, he said, ‘understands this is a nation at war’ against terrorists intent on striking America again. It is imperative that voters elect candidates who know that ‘there is an enemy which hates those of us who embrace freedom and would like to strike us again.’”

Yes, unlike your average Democrat, Mike Sodrel is a competent guy. He hates terrorists, unlike your average Dem. He understands war, unlike your average Dem. He knows we have enemies who hate us, unlike your average Dem. Oh, and he supports the military, unlike every Dem. See? The war in Iraq is improving already, and we didn’t even have to address it.

And then there is übercommander-in-chief Dick Cheney, who, also on Friday at another Republican candidate’s fundraiser, “portrayed the entire Democratic leadership as wobbly in the fight against terrorism.” Railed the veep: “Leading Democrats have demanded a sudden withdrawal from the battle against terrorists in Iraq -- the very kind of retreat that Osama bin Laden has been predicting. And with that sorry record, the leaders of the Democratic Party have decided to run on the theme of competence.”

Ah, not only are Democrats incompetent, they are, by implication, in active league with bin Laden. Never mind that that ridiculous charge would have ensnarled the veep in a bloody duel of honor two centuries ago. It was enough -- nicely introduced by the equally ridiculous charge that Dems “have demanded a sudden withdrawal” -- to distract from the inextricable mess in Iraq that the Bushies have made.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing that the Democrats are competent. Lord knows they do their best in battling that charge. I’d just like to hear a debate. But what we’ll likely get instead is endless coverage of how effective the Bush strategy is by degrees, which will drive any debate into obscurity and in itself imbue the strategy with effectiveness. And the Bushies know it. It’s just another little twist on Dean Acheson’s cynical maxim.

Ignorance is (the base's) Strength

A few days ago I wrote about the eerily growing similarity between the Bush administration’s modus operandi and the tactics of George Orwell’s totalitarian construct of Big Brother. The president’s abruptly but subtly introduced policy change -- a vague timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq -- was precisely what his administration had vehemently argued against, and was now for, yet no administration official would dare confirm the stated change any more than Big Brother would have confirmed that Oceania’s enemy had at any time “changed” -- that its enemy was now Eurasia, no longer Eastasia, or vice versa.

War was perpetual and immutable for Big Brother. His enemy and objectives were always the same, even when his enemy and objectives were different, for to admit any change would have been to admit fallibility. And Big Brother was never wrong.

Today the Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin also notes this eerie similarity of language manipulation between Bush and Big Brother. “Bush's avoidance of the word ‘war,’” for instance, “in the context of Iraq is the rule…. There is no war, except for the war that never ends [the ‘global war on terror’], and we're winning [despite all the glaring signs that we’re losing]…. There are plenty of potential Orwell analogies in Bush's use of language, and his historical revisionism.”

What fascinates me as much as official manipulation of language, however, is the roughly one-third of the public that persists in accepting it -- that one-third known as Bush’s base. How is it that otherwise normally functioning, reasonably intelligent adults could swallow such patent nonsense? How is it that any Party member, at this late and miserable stage, could deflect reality so effectively and thus continue buying into Bush’s surreal distortions?

And to this question Orwell had an answer that we know to be a psychological truism in the surreal politics of today. He -- rather, Big Brother -- called it crimestop, meaning “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the Party], and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

Protective stupidity -- the desperate need of, it appears from polling numbers, fully one-third of the American public to shield itself from ever admitting error and blindly follow the conspicuously corrupt and discredited leadership of the Bush administration.

Network talking heads and print pundits are almost eulogistic when citing what they label as Bush’s abysmally low numbers. But to me, one-third of nearly 300 million people is a frightfully high fraction of willful, protective stupidity.

Things have gotten so bad that Iran -- yes, Iran, that one-stop international headquarters for all your whacky revolutionary-terrorist needs -- now appears more globally responsible than the United States -- that erstwhile gorilla of superpower stability.

Yes, Iran, of all nations, is now talking to the U.S. like an exasperated but conscientious Dutch uncle. Said one of that nation’s diplomats on Thursday, “I think Iraq is a good testing ground for America to take a harder look at the way it acts. If there’s a determination in America to take that hard look, then we’re prepared to help.”

How embarrassing.

Yet signaling how desperate the U.S. is to extricate itself from a self-imposed quagmire of no other options, our statuesque secretary of state conceded that talks with Iran could be “useful.”

Iraqi Sunnis aren’t quite as hip about all this newfound brotherhood of cooperation, of course. But they’re just minority spoilsports, whose minority status happens to become more minor every day because of Iran-sponsored tribal cleaning -- which we prefer to call robust democratic pluralism.

Meanwhile, back on the homefront, former native advocates of robust democratic pluralism are getting restless. The neoconservative vision of Jeffersonianism writ large is more obscured each day and the adjectival use of “naïve” now seems to precede “neoconservatism” with exponential frequency.

The growing ranks of international realists -- or what one could cattily call neo-neoconservatives -- have, according to recent reports, been “shaken” by the failed nation-building events in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They have also been shaken by the victory of Hamas in Palestinian elections in January and by the gains Islamists scored in elections in Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon.”

Furthermore, they are recognizing that our “heavy-handed pressure has strained American relations with Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia and China, making it harder to enlist them in fighting terrorism [and] stabilizing the Middle East.”

And just to round out this robin of global nightmares, even the White House’s overdue national security strategy has admitted the healthy persistent of those “strongholds of tyranny, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Belarus, Myanmar and Zimbabwe.”

Is there a neoconservative left who could honestly say that as a result of the Bush administration’s elephantine testicles we are -- anyone is -- safer today than on September 10, 2001?

Last, the NYT’s Bob Herbert quoted an item this week from Foreign Affairs whose dimensions are nothing less than staggering:

“By some estimates, the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the [U.S.] invasion has reached six figures -- vastly more than have been killed by all international terrorists in all of history.”

Put another way, given the manner in which Bush has conducted his neoconservative counterterrorism campaign, literally everyone in the world would have been safer to date if no action at all had ever been taken against terrorists.

That’s a shocking realization.

Doing a passable Claude Rains impersonation, Russ Feingold has expressed shock that his fellow Democrats are “cowering” before Republicans.

“I’m amazed at Democrats ... cowering with this president’s numbers so low,” said Feingold yesterday. Yes, he’s shocked I tell you, to learn that Democratic timidity is taking place in his little establishment.

All this shock and cowering comes as a result of the Wisconsin senator and presidential candidate having introduced a censure resolution against POTUS for having committed the criminally and incredibly obvious, although, as the Associated Press reports, “not a single Democrat has embraced [the resolution].”

Why? Well, “they want to see the results of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation before supporting any punitive legislation.”

As soon as you’re through laughing over that one….

Putting the politics in further perspective, the WP reports that ballsy “GOP leaders who had been reeling from the impact of Republican political scandals, an unpopular war and Bush’s mishandling of the port-security issue” -- and, by the way, the Harriet Meirs fiasco and the exploding deficit and twisted intelligence and a nightmarish Medicare program and … you get the point -- “sensed that Feingold overplayed his hand [emphasis added].”

I labeled “GOP leaders” as “ballsy” because the then-ensuing passage, of course, pretty much encapsulated Republican chutzpah. All those self-inflicted wounds from breathtaking malfeasance, yet the GOP still manages to play the ethical nanny -- and gets away with it.

“Many Democrats, while sympathetic to Feingold’s maneuver, appeared to be distancing themselves from his resolution yesterday, wary of polls showing that a majority of Americans side with the president on wiretapping tactics.”

And that, as you know, is the trouble with Democrats. They aren’t just now cowering in the face of Feingold’s gambit: they’ve been cowering for five years in the face of the ballsiest nonsensical government ever perpetrated on the American people. And they’ve done so with polls in hand rather than the truth in mind.

There is real doubt, at long last, whether Democrats ever will realize that public opinion is shaped by outspoken leadership, that ballsiness works, and that only wariness has kept them as second-class political citizens.

When asked Tuesday if he thought Feingold was “grandstanding for 2008,” Sen. Joe Biden answered: “No, I think it’s more of an intense frustration. Do any of you in the news media or any of us have any idea what the president is doing?”

Speaking of intense frustration, Joe, none of us has any idea what your party is doing, either, and all are fed up that it’s doing so damned little of it.

I was just rereading George Orwell’s 1984 in an attempt to catch up on current events, when sure enough, no sooner had I finished than I read this in the WP:

“President Bush vowed for the first time yesterday to turn over most of Iraq to newly trained Iraqi troops by the end of this year, setting a specific benchmark as he kicked off a fresh drive to reassure Americans alarmed by the recent burst of sectarian violence.

“Bush, who until now has resisted concrete timelines as the Iraq war dragged on longer than he expected, outlined the target in the first of a series of speeches intended to lay out his strategy for victory.”

Just like that -- a major policy change, seemingly, and it was dropped on the public as though nothing had changed at all.

Which takes us back to 1984, whose protagonist, Winston Smith, was a mid-level rewrite man for Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth.

Each day it was Winston’s job to reinvent modern history, to restate the present as though past to present were nonlinear, and, most pragmatically, to “correct” previously published Party versions of, say, industrial output statistics or the war’s progress with whatever version the Party now deemed more suitable for the news-consuming masses.

And the masses, according to the novel’s creator, “could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.”

Orwell called them the people, the proles, the members, the masses -- a globular lump of non-specific groupings. Today, however, we can be quite comfortably specific and call these sane few “The 36 Percent” -- those loyal numbers still capable of clinging to sanity only by questioning nothing at all, as long as it spews forth from the Party, aka the GOP.

Indeed, were you to read today of an unnamed man “of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms -- one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom … the stability of the Party depend[s],” would your thoughts jump to an Orwell character or your neighbor who still sports a Bush-Cheney ’04 bumper sticker?

For my money, more Gore

The Sunday New York Times Magazine has a novella-sized profile of former Va. governor and presidential candidate Mark Warner that is either uplifting or unsettling, depending on one’s level of allegiance to Hillary in the upcoming, cannibalistic bloodfest of Democratic king-making.

If you see the New York senator’s opportunistic lurchings to the right as too clever by half, perhaps you’ll see Warner -- the only perceived Great Southern Hope -- as a welcome addition to the party’s mix. If, on the other hand, you have either accepted Hillary the Inevitable or enthusiastically endorse her, you’ll likely see Mr. Warner -- “onto whom a lot of anti-Hillary Democrats have suddenly projected their hopes” -- as little more than meddlesome.

True, Warner has a few qualities that brush up against presidential stature. Foremost, he’s a pragmatic dealmaker -- a “Reformer with Results” who entails actual reform with actual results -- as the profile recounts. “Relentlessly wooing his Republican Legislature at a time when the two parties in Washington were growing ever more belligerent toward each other, Warner managed to erase a potentially catastrophic $6 billion budget shortfall by working out a bipartisan deal to raise some taxes … and lower others.”

And his domestic vision seems grounded enough in competence, based on his past -- and, again, actual -- business success. “Warner's constant theme, which a lot of Washington politicians talk about but few seem to actually understand, was [is] the need to modernize for a global economy.”

But then there’s the downside. And to me, it’s a steep one.

“That Warner isn't ready for all the questions a presidential candidate must field was apparent during a somewhat calamitous interview in January with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's ‘This Week.’ Warner seemed surprised and uncomfortable when the host tried to pin him down on questions that divided the country and his party. He refused to say whether he thought Samuel Alito should be confirmed for the Supreme Court or whether he thought the president had the authority to order domestic wiretaps without a court's permission.”

I saw that interview. It was like watching a Roger Mudd maul a Ted Kennedy, or, rather, a Kennedy allowing himself to be mauled out of an inexcusable lack of preparation, a failure to strap on some cajones, or worse, a refusal to bow to controversy -- in short, the spectacle equated to a Hillarization of Mark Warner.

Hence, with that all too familiar feeling of growing alienation from the slate of probable Democratic candidates, I was relieved to read this in the Warner profile about another, and largely forgotten, Great Southern Hope:

“With almost two years to go before the first votes are cast, some insiders who question Clinton's electability dream of finding yet another candidate who has the national profile and who could generate enough excitement among the base to match her. The question is, Who? ‘This sounds absolutely strange coming from me, because I never in life thought I would utter these words again,’ [Donna] Brazile says, ‘but Al Gore.’ It's true that Gore has been a fiery critic of Bush in recent months, but former advisers who still talk to him say he seems genuinely uninterested.”

The two operative hopefuls in that passage are “seems … uninterested” and “almost two years to go.”

I cannot, of course, read Al Gore’s mind or crawl into his bad alpha self, but something inside me says that Al has learned a lesson -- and the lesson is that the next presidential candidate who’s willing to banish nervous, endlessly polling advisers and simply tell it like it is, is also the next president.

That’s not Hillary’s style, it’s not Warner’s style, nor is it Biden’s or Bayh’s or Edwards’ or any other visible Democrat’s. But Al Gore has had the freedom -- and wisdom -- in the last six years to develop a sense of dire national reality that others seem determined to dance around.

So Al, please work up some genuine interest in getting your “fiery critic” show on the electoral road.

Here’s a fine portrait of cautious political inertia by the Washington Post (to which Howard Kurtz has a good follow-up Thursday) that highlights the Democratic Party’s never-ending angst.

Party leaders … have yet to decide whether Democrats should focus on a sharply negative campaign against President Bush and the Republicans, by jumping on debacles such as the administration’s handling of the Dubai port deal -- or stress their own priorities and values.

The days are ticking -- flying -- off the calendar in this election year, while the only organized (I know, I know, an odd word to use) hope of body-slamming the GOP sits and thinks, then sits and thinks some more.

On Feb. 27, [Senate Minority Leader] Reid and [House counterpart] Pelosi appeared before the Democratic Governors Association. At one point in the conversation, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, noting that the two leaders had talked about a variety of themes and ideas, asked for help. Could they reduce the message to just two or three core ideas that governors could echo in the states?

According to multiple accounts from those in the room, Reid said they had narrowed the list to six and proceeded to talk about them. Pelosi then offered her six -- not all the same as Reid’s. Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski said later: “One of the other governors said ‘What do you think?’ and I said ‘You know what I think? I don’t think we have a message.’

I’m beginning to think they never will, or at least not until the Dems nominate a presidential candidate two years down the road, whose one voice will then represent some semblance of a unified approach.

But it was this paragraph that got me to thinking about an alternative approach in the interim:

“It could be a great year for Democrats,” said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), but the party must present a more moderate face and distinguish itself more clearly from the GOP on issues such as ethics. “The comment I hear is ‘I’d really like to vote for you guys, but I can’t stand the folks I see on TV,’ “ Cooper said in a telephone interview from Nashville.

Bingo. Nothing quite so uninspires like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. While the former struggles to deliver hellfire in a monotone, the latter radiates with transparent desperation. It’s a pitiful, ill-at-ease version of good cop, bad cop, and is in need of merciful euthanasia.

The aforementioned alternative? Pull a Goldwater-Reagan 1964, in which an unappealing senator lassoed a slick persona to deliver a televised address on his behalf. I’m thinking maybe George Clooney on behalf of DCCC and DSCC. And should modified election laws prohibit such a cheesy but winning marketing gimmick, just appoint Clooney vice-chair of both organizations. Have you ever met an election law that can’t be circumvented?

The fundamental point is -- try anything, try a wholly negative message, try a wholly positive message, just try something different and with a fresh voice. Because what the Dems have going isn’t going anywhere.

The New York Times reports this morning that geneticists have just presented the “strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving,” and “the genes that show this evolutionary change include … brain function.”

I challenge those geneticists to read the paper’s Washington, national and international sections and then stick to that finding.

"Civil liberties do not mean much when you are dead," said Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky, on the Senate floor yesterday.

Thus spoke one of the New Republican voices in support of anti-Americanism.

Bunning’s predecessors -- the Old Guard voices of “Better dead than red” -- are surely rolling over in their graves wondering how, precisely, their beloved party of individual freedom greased the skids for such modern-day bundists.

The good senator’s comment came just before “the Senate on Wednesday swatted aside a prolonged filibuster against the renewal of the USA Patriot Act and agreed to add new curbs on the government's power to pry into private records under President Bush's antiterror law…. The new curbs restrict somewhat the government's ability to access records in terrorism investigations by allowing court challenges to some demands.”

What, however, is the point of “curbing” anything at all in writing, when George W. Bush could, can, might, will simply attach a signing statement to the legislation saying he’ll interpret the bill any way he likes, or simply ignore the curbs without any comment and with all impunity?

And if you don’t like it, he could, can, might, will simply extraordinarily render your harmless ass to anywhere at any time he pleases.

I recall mass scoffing at the Old Guard’s bugaboo of “Better dead than red” years ago, because we all knew the Reds weren’t really about to deploy on Virginia Beach and force-feed borscht and other commie gruel to our children. The slogan was laughable, because the scenario about which it warned was a laughable straw man erected only to funnel billions and then billions more into unnecessary defense programs.

But today the old mantra, slightly modified, is no bugaboo because it has taken on a real significance. There are indeed living, breathing, elected high officials -- reference Senator Bunning -- in majority power right here in River City advocating and condoning the eradication of American freedoms right before our eyes, in plain view.

“Better dead than red-state” actually means something, is a sentiment to take seriously and warm to, because the anti-American threat of liberty deprived actually exists. It is no laughing matter. Its powerful proponents scoff at Franklin’s now oft-quoted admonition that “those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither” -- and they seem intent on making the Bundist Way the American Way.

Memo to Republican Representative Chris Shays: You can have him.

The “him” is Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman. The reason is we don’t want him. And the hilarity is that Republicans are now anxious to claim certain Democrats as ideological blood brothers in a desperate attempt to dilute the growing public image of partisan stupidity as an exclusive, wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.

That’s my take, anyway, on the truly curious development in Connecticut, where a local newspaper reports “it [is] unclear … why Shays told The Advocate he hoped Republicans would consider endorsing Lieberman.

“It's been the subject of whispered conversations among top Republican officials for the past month. Now, U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, R-4th District, has let slip the secret: GOP officials have discussed cross-endorsing Democratic Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman this fall.

”In an interview today with the editorial board of The Advocate of Stamford, Shays said he intends to vote for Lieberman and is encouraging a Republican endorsement of the three-term senator.”

Let’s face it, if you were a Republican strategist wouldn’t you want to identify with as many Democrats as you could passably conjure up? Would you want your candidates going into the 2006 election as the sole supporters of a failed, criminal administration? Wouldn’t you want to exclaim that this Dem or that Dem has been just as stupid as your party and your candidates?

Of course you would. And as it turns out, Shays is “facing [a] tough re-election” campaign from one Diane Farrell, “who also ran two years ago [and] has used the war as a cudgel against Shays, although she is supporting Lieberman.” God only knows why -- except for reasons of party loyalty, which was once a principled Republican virtue but will now go the route of other Republican principles (see, for example, balanced budgets, among a few dozen others) that might collide with the overarching Republican Weltanschauung of simply maintaining power.

"We're not surprised that there are people within the Republican Party that would think about endorsing Joe. He clearly is George Bush's favorite Democrat," said Tom Swan, campaign manager for Lieberman’s primary opponent.

Yes, he is. And for that reason George and Chris and the GOP can have him. We don’t want him. The Republicans deserve him.